For integrated circuit capacitors, capacitance is a function of capacitor area on the chip. The chip area allocated to capacitors is particularly significant for integrated circuits such as dynamic RAMs (DRAMs) that use a significant number of capacitive components.
To reduce the chip area that must be allocated to capacitors, the amount of capacitance per unit area must be increased. One technique for increasing capacitance per unit area is to fabricate multilevel capacitors from interleaved conductive and dielectric layers or plates--capacitance per unit area is then proportional to the number of interleaved capacitive plates.
A significant problem with multilevel integrated circuit capacitors, however, is making the appropriate electrode connections to the interleaved capacitor plates. Current techniques for fabricating multilevel capacitors, and in particular, for making electrode connections to the interleaved capacitor plates, require non-standard procedures that are difficult to control.
Accordingly, a need exists for a multilevel integrated circuit capacitor structure that can be fabricated using conventional fabrication processes.